EHC seems to do Ed’s, meds, housing, and babymaking shitty. A lot of it relies on an unsustainable debt load and demographics. I don’t see this changing, it’s an incentive structure thing that isn’t going away because of some substack posts.
Its end point seems to be California, and California barely works due to legacy capital from the before times. Shittier versions of the California model without legacy capital can be found in cities through the rust belt and northeast.
I think of my nephew that visited from California. He and fiancé got chemistry degrees and work in a lab. But they can’t afford a house. They’ve got student loans. They earn average for their job which is a good job, but it’s not enough. They have put off getting married and starting a family. She’s thinking of going to back to school to become a nurse, because getting the right side of the unsustainable meds racket seems like the only path to stability. They are 30 and it’s hard to see them settling down anytime soon.
If you’re well off and own a house from the before times it’s OK I guess. But even if you’re doing well it’s still frustrating that you can’t actually buy anything meaningful (I’m not counting consumer goods).
The “beautiful bubbles” are shrinking. The few places left regular people can live well are all right wing.
Honestly, a lot of this housing problem could be solved if people were willing to move to tier 2 and tier 3 cities. There are probably a dozen major cities in the US with at least half the cost of living of the entire state of California. Theres a reason domestic migration into California has been negative for 15 years.
That's a good move for some people, but depending on your vocation you may need to be in certain major metros. If you're in Pharma/Biotech, you basically have to live in Boston, San Francisco, or San Diego.
I think one weird wrinkle is that a huge portion of the housing market locked in 3% rates a few years ago, and now moving means resetting to 6% rates. Pete Thiel mentioned this to Lex Freedmen for why there has been a slowdown of people moving Blue to Red. Its ripe for a solution that unlocks this hidden value.
Comments that are just positive tend to be low value, but I will mention anyway that I very much enjoyed this article and will engage in the further readings listed at the end!
Honestly, nobody knows how sustainable the current system (CR) is. And as other systems become less sustainable (poorer, more chaotic), more money flows into the CR and sustains it further. The CR is indeed decaying as evidenced by rising crime, third-worldization, and vanishing liberties (in America though liberties are vanishing more slowly thanks to the Constitution and a partially conservative judiciary); but decay anyhow can be a very long process, see the Byzantines who were basically decaying for a thousand years.
More and more I'm with Peter Thiel on this - the way out of the CR is not through "RETVRN" or weird notions of governance (pro-aristocratic gay bodybuilders in a techno-monarchy or whatever), but through super healthy economic growth. Now, the decaying CR is the opposite of super healthy growth (I'm talking Victorian type of growth), but if somehow such growth were to happen (maybe a Milei or a Trump or an unexpected technological advancement), the CR will be transformed.
Moldbug is often just wrong. For instance he relies on the idea we are in the FDR Republic still. Yet almost immediately afterwards FDR that system began to decline. The American Procedures Act in 1946, one year after FDR presidency ended, set limits on the federal agencies. Since then the power of these agencies has continuously trended downwards through lifting of price controls, ending of conscription, privatization, and court cases.
So what about EHC? There's two problems. First it's only in the last decade that the left has switched from being the party of the poor and uneducated to the party of the rich and educated. Second, the education system is no longer required for information due to the internet, so it's primary purpose now is indoctrination which was not the case even 30 years ago. The portions that are required for credentials such as engineering, doctors, mba, compsci all lean relatively conservative.
Moldbug is useful for thinking through the world in a way that can help break down ideology, but he doesn't get all his facts straight.
this is a good point - made originally by BAP that a lot of "left moldbug" stuff is overextrapolating from today's news. Russian pipe blew up shows how the Russian regime is bankrupt etc.
It's a nice utility post. Point #8 is not really true. You can see that GenZ and Millennials on-the-whole believe in retard socialism more than their parents and the state has gotten more socialist with time. Furthermore, the linkage from economic conservatism to IQ is positive but remarkably weak. I think another aspect of Left Moldbuggism is: besides addiction and violent crime, any widely agreed upon social problem in the U.S. is WORSE in the most natural illiberal alternative. You think infertility is bad, well it is worse in China and Europe. Economic growth is down? Worse in Europe and economic growth in China is far below potential. Immigration and concomitant race relations? Actually worse in Europe. And so on. This rules out alternatives by single-dimensional comparison.
It really depends on what you mean by "illiberal". You could easily make the case these problems aren't as bad due to Conservative opposition to Progressivism since the 70s which was on balance much less successful everywhere else, in Europe the political right collapsed everywhere once the Cold War ended. The issue with Moldbugs thesis is that the opposition was successful due to things he claims are fake. The Constitution, political organizing, electoral victories, etc.
I think that these are reasonable objections and share them. In my above comment, I am mainly concerned with accurately characterizing left moldbugism.
But Europe is liberal. It IS an extension of the US system, unlike the CCP. So any dysfunction there, cant be neatly set aside from the wider ideology. Unlike say, when the Ayatollah does something 'tarded.
I agree, but that still leaves most Moldbug pet peeves worse in other countries mentioned, with the exception of immigration. But for that you got the golf states.
Murder rates are actually slightly higher in Russia than the United States, which means white Russian murder rates must be much higher than white American murder rates. So you can keep violent crime of the list.
Does Left-Moldbuggism have solutions for birthrate collapse and all its ancillary problems? Any ideology which doesn't at least consider that problem is not worth serious discussion, Moldbug included. Sure, it may be interesting to play with, but it doesn't do anything to address the central existential question that everyone is being inexorably pulled toward. Nothing else trumps this concern: either we solve our birthrates problem, or we go into a new Dark Age where the old civilization collapses, the old elite reproduction system is replaced by banditry, scientific progress stops and space colonization is scrapped due to lack of infrastructure. No doubt the ethnic map will look completely different as well. In so many words, the Bronze Age Collapse but worse.
If an ideology can't explain why it's useful in that regard, it deserves to be put on the trash can of history along with Derrida and Plotinus.
I think the Left Moldbuggist case is that if we can get the smart people to read Bryan Caplan and pop out 5-6 each then we can turn population collapse into a good thing.
If that's really it, then it's already pretty depressing. If you can't support 5-6 kids, you simply can't have 5-6 kids no matter how much you will it so. Not without becoming a ghettoized ward of the state, anyway.
If there's no third alternative to "tech elite with no kids" and "dirt poor with 5 kids (or worse, ghetto poor with 7 kids by 5 baby mamas)" for the average high-achiever type, and the only people who can get it are the few who've made it into billionaire status, then there's no prospect for the civilized milieu of high IQ nerd types which makes up our scientific institutions.
I don't really buy this. Most of the people I know my age and up have 5+ kids and Israel has worse affordable family formation than California. It's really just about cultural pressure and you find a way to make it work.
It's still true that liberalism is dysgenic death cult, but if (and yes it's a big if) you can get enough smart openminded people to read Caplan and start having big families, then it really does basically solve that question.
Betting on the Caplans and the Bloombergs of the world to beat out the Elizabeth Warrens, the Soroses and Bill Gates, and the Ibram X Kendis has always been a losing bet.
Listen, buddy, do you like civilization? Fertilizer, global trade, space satellites, scientific research? You know, all the things that combine to give you your First World living standards? Then you like the fruits of human biomass, you bilge rat!
That's not to say there's some monotonic relationship where if only you pump up the numbers then everything will just get better, but the 21st-c. economy that supports your lifestyle cannot be maintained on rapidly shrinking biomass. At a certain point the machine just stops working when you starve it of fuel, and your ability to science your way out of the problem will go with it as you take a flying leap backward in terms of human progress.
If you want the world to not live through a new Dark Age on a scale that would put all previous collapses to shame, then you want to solve the Human Biofuel Question pronto! Human biomass can exist without adding anything to human progress, but human progress cannot exist without human biomass to feed it.
You know what happened last time there was a big decline in human biomass? It was called the Renaissance. It would have never happened without the changes brought about by the black death that preceded it.
Or how about the decline in biomass when the Mongols ransacked China, Persia and Russia? Or the decline in biomass from any Chinese megadeath event, really! Mongol conquest, the fall of the Yuan dynasty, the fall of the Ming dynasty and the Taiping rebellion all killed numbers easily in the range of the Black Death. You tell me whether the results produced a Renaissance. Megadeaths don't just translate into Renaissance; that's cargo cult thinking. Otherwise you would have seen a renaissance in Russia after WW2.
My point is not that they directly translate into Renaissances, My point is that a large declines in human biomass are not inherently negative. Especially when they are not caused directly by violence between humans. It can be argued that the US in its current form wouldn't even exist if the diseases that killed 90% of native Americans hadn't existed.
They're not inherently negative, but they're also not inherently positive. Without counterexamples, the natural endpoint of that line of reasoning is that nuclear war will be a net benefit for humanity.
As for the native Americans, that didn't exactly benefit them, did it? Just switch out native Americans for low-fertility European countries, and settler Americans for high-fertility African countries. Under the present immigration regime, that's where most of the post-collapse Europe's gene pool will come from. Non-Africans will end up as marginal in the European genetic makeup as Neanderthals are today, for exactly the same reason.
More-or-less AGI + an end to resources constraints.
But a precise definition isn't too important. My point is that 'left moldbuggists' often think that some version of the Singularity will happen fast enough to avert the most harmful consequences of collapsing birthrates, inverted age pyramids and dysgenics.
to sum up the main, important points that you've listed/described:
Original Moldbug:
current US system of governance isn't effective because it has evolved to do a different thing, which is maintain power, and the methods by which it does it detracts from better outcomes, which are roughly provided by "letting capitalism do its thing."
Left Moldbug:
and yet, the outcomes are pretty good, you can avoid most of the bad ones, it seem pretty naturally-evolved, and the solutions you propose don't seem like they would work, so "we should work within the system to improve it"
From you:
"[rhetorically] why is the current system so unacceptable?" and "there doesn't seem to actually be a disaster on the horizon that we need radical changes to prevent"
I might add 2 things, specifically re: "is there a looming disaster?"
1. even if US outcomes are good (or even best worldwide), if the gap between those outcomes and what (enough) citizens expect is their due is wide/deep enough, they will support populist factions that might not only wreck (or clumsily try to) the left-liberalism/cathedral but the good things too, and that itself is a disaster. If it happens in a small country, it's not a big deal, but happening in the capital nation would be a global catastrophe.
2. The debt crisis is a medium term looming disaster, and the cures for it are currently anathema not only to the status quo, but to the avatar of anti-status-quo policy in the US. An actual American Milei might work, but we currently the closest we have is one that inflated the money supply the most and ran on never cutting the largest portions of the budget. Again, if it happens in a small country like Argentina, not that big a deal, but in the US, with the expectations of various factions would result in disaster.
To me, all the other stuff just seems like (perhaps entertaining) culture-war window dressing. (not in a criticism way, just in a .... here's the thing that's probably gonna kill us, maybe let's think about it)
There seems to be a couple common thought processes that lead someone to what you describe.
A: Thinking that winning produces goodness. The left elite keep winning and expanding their power, so if they are winning, they must be good.
B: Intellectual, esoteric contrarianism instead of popular contrarianism. Hanania and a certain group of internet users with prominent globe avatars like to latch on to the list of grievances moldbug types put out and say, "well those are all good things, akshually."
Deep Left has a lot of interesting articles, but the majority usually have one or several premises that are deeply flawed.
I think that's accurate, but, then, on the other hand, I do see the appeal of picking the winning team if only because otherwise what's the point? Losers don't get to make decisions. Samuel Francis famously teased conservatism for being a movement of 'beautiful losers', but it seems that the Dissident Right's advance on this was becoming ugly losers.
Being on the winning team doesn't mean you get to make the decisions either. In the case of commentators, it means a lifetime of trying to justify all the bad decisions the people at the top make. Very undignified.
Great read. Might write something in the left Muldbig genre in the future.
> Speaking of China, the reason that they went full retard on Covid (when they could have used it as a weapon to destroy the west) seems to boil down to ‘Xi Jinping is scared of the flu’.
I don't think he is scared of the flu as much as disorder. An terminal phobia of Confucian cultures, exacerbated by totalitarian forms of government. But westernized states are not immune. Japan, Taiwan and Korea seem so afraid of illegitimate children, that they would rather not have children at all.
The problem with ‘moldbuggers’ left and right is that they are largely defective physically or mentally. None are ‘EHC’ anything . Many are autistic, Jewish, or other outlier groups (Hanania; 2nd generation Palestinian Christian). Karlin is a Russian transhumanist kook. When you look at this online political tendency on a personal level and dissect its premises it offers nothing even to the base of support it tries appealing to.
None of these people have ever fought in a war or been close to a battlefield in their little coddled lives. They are academics or shut-ins. The weaklings Nietzsche (their
inspirational hero) dismissed in his day.
America is in decline not on the ascent. It is a still very wealthy and powerful at the moment but in inexorable social, moral, economic, and demographic (as far as its core white population). There won’t be a global empire of anything as there aren’t global people or citizens who would support such an entity. Americans by nature are insular and don’t particularly care what happens in other parts of the world as long as it affects them.
The U.S. economy makes a few people rich and many more poor today. It is based on financial speculation and tech is its only saving grace. The middle and working classes are more in debt than ever with a sharp decline in living standards. Their children and grandchildren will have even lower living standards. Barring a complete political and social revolution along with a restructuring of the economy beck to production and development and away from financial parasitism and speculation, poverty and decline is the likely future.
Hard to spend all day looking at graphs without turning into a GDP-brained utilitarian. The genuinely reactionary version of Moldbug Thought: we should have used Covid as an excuse to end all international trade, Carlyle was right about slavery, salus populi suprema lex, etc.
The term utilitarian is used to mean two different things. One is a superficially attractive but deeply flawed theory of ethics that is espoused today by a very small group of people. The other is any attempt to base your political beliefs on reasoned engagement with evidence with awareness that there are greater and lesser evils that must be weighed against each other. In the latter sense, all people with sense are 'utilitarians' and rejection of 'utilitarianism' is the path to madness. Any attempt to implement the concept of salus populi suprema lex also involves 'utilitarianism' in this sense.
Sure, my point was just that ethics is sometimes downstream from epistemology: being obsessed with data/statistics will lead you to prioritize the goods and evils that you can most easily quantify (GDP, IQ, life expectancy, fertility rate, etc.).
But clearly there’s also an a priori path to bad utilitarianism. Replacing the bureaucratic state with a JSC that controls the army via blockchain… this is Bentham-level autism.
'Sure, my point was just that ethics is sometimes downstream from epistemology: being obsessed with data/statistics will lead you to prioritize the goods and evils that you can most easily quantify (GDP, IQ, life expectancy, fertility rate, etc.).'
True, but being breezily unconcerned with statistics also has its own dangers.
I don't believe that there are real examples of this after the collapse of Communism. It's a hypothetical objection that does not reflect real social problems.
But the group you are referring to will, with a straight face, make the case that Mississippians are better off than the Japanese because their GDP per capita is higher.
Yes, moldbugs project, for this reason. Is less like political science and more like a Foucaultian analysis of the provenance of the various power structures in the GAE.
Since Isreal has a high gdp,high fertility rate,high human rights index and high mean age of death why do political commentators(like the ones mentioned here) keep coming up with fancy theories and names instead of copying the juice
Immigration to Israel in 1990 was 200,000, equal to 4.5% of the population at the time. By contrast, immigration to America was about 1% of the population in 2023. Israel has extensive policies specifically for the purpose of boosting immigration.
Now, you will probably respond with some WN talking point about how this is different because Israel wants Jews, whereas America takes anyone. That is certainly a relevant difference, but it is not really a relevant criticism of Richard Hananiah who, while typically slippery and evasive on the issue, has admitted that immigration to Europe has not been beneficial and believes America benefits because it gets better immigrants. For him, Mexicans who want to make money are the equivalent of what diaspora Jews are for Israel. It is objectively a fact that the 'native' Israeli culture built by the Zionist pioneers was destroyed and replaced because of immigration no less (and probably rather more) than WASP American culture.
I personally don't believe that high immigration in Israel is such a good thing. It leads to a lowest denominator culture, and a lot of negative externalities. But Richard Hananiah is not being inconsistent in worshipping Israel while supporting high immigration. The relevant criticism of Richard Hananiah is that he always ducks the question of how in the long term America is supposed to avoid getting the same trash immigrants Europe does.
Israel at independence was like 80% Ashkenazi. The founders explicitly pursued a policy of mass third world migration. A bunch of Mizrahim immigrated and became the ethnic majority. They had lower IQ than the Ashkenazim and were less liberal. This changed the culture a ton in all sorts of ways.
"For him, Mexicans who want to make money are the equivalent of what diaspora Jews are for Israel."
I have no idea, are diaspora Jews who immigrating to Israel as uneducated and poor as the Mexicans immigrating to the US? Do they bring Jewish drug cartels with them? Hanania's argument is just a copy of Caplan's argument. More immigration = more labor and demand = more GDP = more good, regardless of how poor and unfit for our culture they are.
"But Richard Hananiah is not being inconsistent in worshipping Israel while supporting high immigration."
Yes he is. Even when Israel has high immigration, there is some basic screening and pretty strict limitations. Hanania advocates no such thing from what I recollect about his position.
Lots and lots of non-Jewish Russians with a distant family connection migrate to Israel. The "others" in Israel are a rather middling socioeconomic status group. Lots of poor Russians in development towns and so on. They do worse than the average Jewish Israeli on tests. Probably their IQ is at most 100 while Israeli Jews average above 100.
Israeli immigration policy is that anyone who has a Jewish grandparent, their spouse, and their children can immigrate. You are Jewish if you converted or if you have a Jewish mother. A bunch of Orthodox converts migrated from Colombia. Let's not forget the time Israel flew in a bunch of Ethiopian Jews on overcrowded planes. Ethiopian Jews are racially the same as other North Ethiopians, with no detectable special Jewish ancestry. Yemenite Jews, like Yigal Amir who shot Rabin, look like normal Arabians, with no detectable Levantine ancestry.
What would the analogue for the US be? Anyone who is at least a quarter European by ancestry, their spouses, and their children? Let's also force them to practice Christianity. Oh, well then that would include Mexican Mestizos. Almost half European by ancestry and practice Christianity.
Israel is very very far from the ethnostate that some WNs imagines it is. This is not even discussing how Israel is 20% Arabs, how the Arab society has normal Arabs, Bedouins, Christians, Druze, how the Jewish majority has Ashkenazi, European Sephardic, Iraqis, mixed, other Mizrahim...
Ethiopians are what, 2% of the Israeli population? And what about the Columbians? Even less? And don't bring up the Arab population as if they just immigrated a few decades ago. They were there in 1948, and long before.
This is all obfuscation from the fact that Israel is very specific about who it lets in its country. The US and Europe are not today. You can be Indian, Chinese, African, etc, have any or no religion, and as long as you fill out the right form or sneak across the border you can stay.
Israel at independence was like 80% Ashkenazi. The founders explicitly pursued a policy of mass third world migration. A bunch of Mizrahim immigrated and became the ethnic majority. They had lower IQ than the Ashkenazim and were less liberal. This changed the culture a ton in all sorts of ways.
America is not located right by Africa. So it won't be flooded with African asylum seekers. Perhaps Haitians, but Haiti is quite small. Most illegal immigrants are from Latin America. Having lots of Hispanics in your country is fine, it doesn't pose a problem like unselected mass migration from the Muslim world or from Africa. Yes the Hispanic IQ is a fair bit lower and the murder rate is maybe 2x, but they assimilate just fine. This is small peanuts compared to the potential gains from embryo selection, and certainly better to have Hispanic immigration than to have an aging population. If we had Israel-levels of TFR things would be different.
Good article and I agree with your overall point that thinking the GAE's fall is imminent and monarchy is soon or a viable solution is beyond cringe at this point.
As someone on the right my main objections are to your points 6 (Living in America is not that bad RE money and crime), 7 (anti-Whiteness is tolerable), 8 (religion and traditional living will be replaced with transhumanism) and the problem of birthrates
So if not collapse and takeover what now? Build a multitude of right-wing organizations not to takeover the entire GAE but to serve the interests of our people. This is not the benedict optoin or the clear pill of total escape from the current system.
We need to move beyond the juvenile attractiveness of our ideas and instead prove our worthiness by building real world fraternities, castles, communities, churches, etc.
Every time I revisit the question of alternatives, the last chapter of Fukuyama's "End of History" pops back into my head. Watching and endless stream of clips of HTS jihadis firing AKs while doing burnouts in Assad's tanks on Telegram these last few days really drives the point home.
The human spirit is truly indomitable. All attempts to contain it, to domesticate it in a managerial technocratic global empire will result in fertility collapse, from which Hayat Tahrir as-Sham will be there to liberate you.
I dunno. I think HTS mouthing US corporate speak and disavowing its Al Queda roots in order to win kind of points to global managerial liberalism being more indomitable than the human spirit.
I prefer Left Landian or Left Alamariuian. I may have read a PDF of Fanged Noumena 10 years ago, but I can't remember. The two people who most inspired me as a teenager were Kevin Philips, former Republican strategist turned Democrat, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cold Warrior and supporter of the Taliban. Moldbug has been good at marketing, interviews, storytelling and is more famous and successful than Nick Land, but I don't know that his ideas were more foundational or influential on me than Land.
Before all of that, my first political fetish was libertarianism, which is where Moldbug comes from as well. I feel bad about saying non-free market things, because it upsets people who are closest to my personality type, and it gets lonely. A pure free market is sometimes the optimal solution to a problem, but since that is usually impossible, aggressive state intervention can be positive. This isn't a dogmatic belief, but for example, I am in favor of a federal property tax to depopulate coastal urban centers and trillions spent in new housing between Knoxville, Albany, OKC, and Fargo. I suppose it depends on your definition whether or not this counts as "leftist economics."
I kind of elided you and RH on this point. His argument is relatively simple: big business leverages dumb people to get enough pro market policies passed even though they are unpopular, and we can just keep doing this indefinitely. You have a more sophisticated version which is that economically inefficient policies can have positive political purposes. Your unions article was a good example.
Ok, what I actually meant to say was "Hanania is braking into mainstream politics". Oops, got too carried way.
The interesting thing about him is that he doesn't really try to hide his core beliefs at all, yet he seems to be growing larger and larger. Some mainstream political pundits openly associate with him, Matthew Yglesias is the obvious example here, and it might be the case that a lot of liberals might be secretly reading him.
Also, the newly elected VP openly admits that Moldbug has influenced him, so it's clear that this ideas are becoming more prominent among the political elite. I know this still isn't "mainstream", but it's a pattern.
When I said Hanania was growing larger and larger I meant that his works seem to be becoming more and more mainstream (people in the next Republican cabinet have read his book about how Woke originates from Civil right law and have taken his recommendations seriously) not that this growth was happening among pundits. My bad. And despite all this, some people like Yglesias are still mutuals with him.
EHC seems to do Ed’s, meds, housing, and babymaking shitty. A lot of it relies on an unsustainable debt load and demographics. I don’t see this changing, it’s an incentive structure thing that isn’t going away because of some substack posts.
Its end point seems to be California, and California barely works due to legacy capital from the before times. Shittier versions of the California model without legacy capital can be found in cities through the rust belt and northeast.
I think of my nephew that visited from California. He and fiancé got chemistry degrees and work in a lab. But they can’t afford a house. They’ve got student loans. They earn average for their job which is a good job, but it’s not enough. They have put off getting married and starting a family. She’s thinking of going to back to school to become a nurse, because getting the right side of the unsustainable meds racket seems like the only path to stability. They are 30 and it’s hard to see them settling down anytime soon.
If you’re well off and own a house from the before times it’s OK I guess. But even if you’re doing well it’s still frustrating that you can’t actually buy anything meaningful (I’m not counting consumer goods).
The “beautiful bubbles” are shrinking. The few places left regular people can live well are all right wing.
Lot of truth here.
Honestly, a lot of this housing problem could be solved if people were willing to move to tier 2 and tier 3 cities. There are probably a dozen major cities in the US with at least half the cost of living of the entire state of California. Theres a reason domestic migration into California has been negative for 15 years.
That's a good move for some people, but depending on your vocation you may need to be in certain major metros. If you're in Pharma/Biotech, you basically have to live in Boston, San Francisco, or San Diego.
Well, they are. I am too. Go free market!
I think one weird wrinkle is that a huge portion of the housing market locked in 3% rates a few years ago, and now moving means resetting to 6% rates. Pete Thiel mentioned this to Lex Freedmen for why there has been a slowdown of people moving Blue to Red. Its ripe for a solution that unlocks this hidden value.
Comments that are just positive tend to be low value, but I will mention anyway that I very much enjoyed this article and will engage in the further readings listed at the end!
Honestly, nobody knows how sustainable the current system (CR) is. And as other systems become less sustainable (poorer, more chaotic), more money flows into the CR and sustains it further. The CR is indeed decaying as evidenced by rising crime, third-worldization, and vanishing liberties (in America though liberties are vanishing more slowly thanks to the Constitution and a partially conservative judiciary); but decay anyhow can be a very long process, see the Byzantines who were basically decaying for a thousand years.
More and more I'm with Peter Thiel on this - the way out of the CR is not through "RETVRN" or weird notions of governance (pro-aristocratic gay bodybuilders in a techno-monarchy or whatever), but through super healthy economic growth. Now, the decaying CR is the opposite of super healthy growth (I'm talking Victorian type of growth), but if somehow such growth were to happen (maybe a Milei or a Trump or an unexpected technological advancement), the CR will be transformed.
Moldbug is often just wrong. For instance he relies on the idea we are in the FDR Republic still. Yet almost immediately afterwards FDR that system began to decline. The American Procedures Act in 1946, one year after FDR presidency ended, set limits on the federal agencies. Since then the power of these agencies has continuously trended downwards through lifting of price controls, ending of conscription, privatization, and court cases.
So what about EHC? There's two problems. First it's only in the last decade that the left has switched from being the party of the poor and uneducated to the party of the rich and educated. Second, the education system is no longer required for information due to the internet, so it's primary purpose now is indoctrination which was not the case even 30 years ago. The portions that are required for credentials such as engineering, doctors, mba, compsci all lean relatively conservative.
Moldbug is useful for thinking through the world in a way that can help break down ideology, but he doesn't get all his facts straight.
this is a good point - made originally by BAP that a lot of "left moldbug" stuff is overextrapolating from today's news. Russian pipe blew up shows how the Russian regime is bankrupt etc.
It's a nice utility post. Point #8 is not really true. You can see that GenZ and Millennials on-the-whole believe in retard socialism more than their parents and the state has gotten more socialist with time. Furthermore, the linkage from economic conservatism to IQ is positive but remarkably weak. I think another aspect of Left Moldbuggism is: besides addiction and violent crime, any widely agreed upon social problem in the U.S. is WORSE in the most natural illiberal alternative. You think infertility is bad, well it is worse in China and Europe. Economic growth is down? Worse in Europe and economic growth in China is far below potential. Immigration and concomitant race relations? Actually worse in Europe. And so on. This rules out alternatives by single-dimensional comparison.
It really depends on what you mean by "illiberal". You could easily make the case these problems aren't as bad due to Conservative opposition to Progressivism since the 70s which was on balance much less successful everywhere else, in Europe the political right collapsed everywhere once the Cold War ended. The issue with Moldbugs thesis is that the opposition was successful due to things he claims are fake. The Constitution, political organizing, electoral victories, etc.
I think that these are reasonable objections and share them. In my above comment, I am mainly concerned with accurately characterizing left moldbugism.
But Europe is liberal. It IS an extension of the US system, unlike the CCP. So any dysfunction there, cant be neatly set aside from the wider ideology. Unlike say, when the Ayatollah does something 'tarded.
I agree, but that still leaves most Moldbug pet peeves worse in other countries mentioned, with the exception of immigration. But for that you got the golf states.
Murder rates are actually slightly higher in Russia than the United States, which means white Russian murder rates must be much higher than white American murder rates. So you can keep violent crime of the list.
Does Left-Moldbuggism have solutions for birthrate collapse and all its ancillary problems? Any ideology which doesn't at least consider that problem is not worth serious discussion, Moldbug included. Sure, it may be interesting to play with, but it doesn't do anything to address the central existential question that everyone is being inexorably pulled toward. Nothing else trumps this concern: either we solve our birthrates problem, or we go into a new Dark Age where the old civilization collapses, the old elite reproduction system is replaced by banditry, scientific progress stops and space colonization is scrapped due to lack of infrastructure. No doubt the ethnic map will look completely different as well. In so many words, the Bronze Age Collapse but worse.
If an ideology can't explain why it's useful in that regard, it deserves to be put on the trash can of history along with Derrida and Plotinus.
I think the Left Moldbuggist case is that if we can get the smart people to read Bryan Caplan and pop out 5-6 each then we can turn population collapse into a good thing.
If that's really it, then it's already pretty depressing. If you can't support 5-6 kids, you simply can't have 5-6 kids no matter how much you will it so. Not without becoming a ghettoized ward of the state, anyway.
If there's no third alternative to "tech elite with no kids" and "dirt poor with 5 kids (or worse, ghetto poor with 7 kids by 5 baby mamas)" for the average high-achiever type, and the only people who can get it are the few who've made it into billionaire status, then there's no prospect for the civilized milieu of high IQ nerd types which makes up our scientific institutions.
forumposter123@protonmail.com summed it up well.
I don't really buy this. Most of the people I know my age and up have 5+ kids and Israel has worse affordable family formation than California. It's really just about cultural pressure and you find a way to make it work.
It's still true that liberalism is dysgenic death cult, but if (and yes it's a big if) you can get enough smart openminded people to read Caplan and start having big families, then it really does basically solve that question.
Betting on the Caplans and the Bloombergs of the world to beat out the Elizabeth Warrens, the Soroses and Bill Gates, and the Ibram X Kendis has always been a losing bet.
Birthrate collapse is a good thing. Worship of human biomass is very democratic and egalitarian.
Listen, buddy, do you like civilization? Fertilizer, global trade, space satellites, scientific research? You know, all the things that combine to give you your First World living standards? Then you like the fruits of human biomass, you bilge rat!
That's not to say there's some monotonic relationship where if only you pump up the numbers then everything will just get better, but the 21st-c. economy that supports your lifestyle cannot be maintained on rapidly shrinking biomass. At a certain point the machine just stops working when you starve it of fuel, and your ability to science your way out of the problem will go with it as you take a flying leap backward in terms of human progress.
If you want the world to not live through a new Dark Age on a scale that would put all previous collapses to shame, then you want to solve the Human Biofuel Question pronto! Human biomass can exist without adding anything to human progress, but human progress cannot exist without human biomass to feed it.
You know what happened last time there was a big decline in human biomass? It was called the Renaissance. It would have never happened without the changes brought about by the black death that preceded it.
There was also an appreciable decline in biomass when the plague ravaged Neolithic Europe. Was there a Renaissance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_decline
There was also a decline in biomass when the plague ravaged Europe during Justinian's reign. Again, what Renaissance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
Or how about the decline in biomass when the Mongols ransacked China, Persia and Russia? Or the decline in biomass from any Chinese megadeath event, really! Mongol conquest, the fall of the Yuan dynasty, the fall of the Ming dynasty and the Taiping rebellion all killed numbers easily in the range of the Black Death. You tell me whether the results produced a Renaissance. Megadeaths don't just translate into Renaissance; that's cargo cult thinking. Otherwise you would have seen a renaissance in Russia after WW2.
My point is not that they directly translate into Renaissances, My point is that a large declines in human biomass are not inherently negative. Especially when they are not caused directly by violence between humans. It can be argued that the US in its current form wouldn't even exist if the diseases that killed 90% of native Americans hadn't existed.
They're not inherently negative, but they're also not inherently positive. Without counterexamples, the natural endpoint of that line of reasoning is that nuclear war will be a net benefit for humanity.
As for the native Americans, that didn't exactly benefit them, did it? Just switch out native Americans for low-fertility European countries, and settler Americans for high-fertility African countries. Under the present immigration regime, that's where most of the post-collapse Europe's gene pool will come from. Non-Africans will end up as marginal in the European genetic makeup as Neanderthals are today, for exactly the same reason.
If anything Left-Moldbug WELCOMES birthrate decline and it is deliberate.
The goal is for accelerationism & select out the dysgenics, what they want is tube grown genetically engineered liberals would replace normal humans.
Yes. Its solution is e/acc and a notional techno-singularity within a short timeframe.
AI is already close to peaking. The singularity isn't coming.
I'm not claiming that it is - I'm saying that it's their notional solution.
Please define techno-singularity. People I've talked to have had different definitions of it, so it would help to get on the same page.
More-or-less AGI + an end to resources constraints.
But a precise definition isn't too important. My point is that 'left moldbuggists' often think that some version of the Singularity will happen fast enough to avert the most harmful consequences of collapsing birthrates, inverted age pyramids and dysgenics.
It's not my view.
to sum up the main, important points that you've listed/described:
Original Moldbug:
current US system of governance isn't effective because it has evolved to do a different thing, which is maintain power, and the methods by which it does it detracts from better outcomes, which are roughly provided by "letting capitalism do its thing."
Left Moldbug:
and yet, the outcomes are pretty good, you can avoid most of the bad ones, it seem pretty naturally-evolved, and the solutions you propose don't seem like they would work, so "we should work within the system to improve it"
From you:
"[rhetorically] why is the current system so unacceptable?" and "there doesn't seem to actually be a disaster on the horizon that we need radical changes to prevent"
I might add 2 things, specifically re: "is there a looming disaster?"
1. even if US outcomes are good (or even best worldwide), if the gap between those outcomes and what (enough) citizens expect is their due is wide/deep enough, they will support populist factions that might not only wreck (or clumsily try to) the left-liberalism/cathedral but the good things too, and that itself is a disaster. If it happens in a small country, it's not a big deal, but happening in the capital nation would be a global catastrophe.
2. The debt crisis is a medium term looming disaster, and the cures for it are currently anathema not only to the status quo, but to the avatar of anti-status-quo policy in the US. An actual American Milei might work, but we currently the closest we have is one that inflated the money supply the most and ran on never cutting the largest portions of the budget. Again, if it happens in a small country like Argentina, not that big a deal, but in the US, with the expectations of various factions would result in disaster.
To me, all the other stuff just seems like (perhaps entertaining) culture-war window dressing. (not in a criticism way, just in a .... here's the thing that's probably gonna kill us, maybe let's think about it)
There seems to be a couple common thought processes that lead someone to what you describe.
A: Thinking that winning produces goodness. The left elite keep winning and expanding their power, so if they are winning, they must be good.
B: Intellectual, esoteric contrarianism instead of popular contrarianism. Hanania and a certain group of internet users with prominent globe avatars like to latch on to the list of grievances moldbug types put out and say, "well those are all good things, akshually."
Deep Left has a lot of interesting articles, but the majority usually have one or several premises that are deeply flawed.
I think that's accurate, but, then, on the other hand, I do see the appeal of picking the winning team if only because otherwise what's the point? Losers don't get to make decisions. Samuel Francis famously teased conservatism for being a movement of 'beautiful losers', but it seems that the Dissident Right's advance on this was becoming ugly losers.
Being on the winning team doesn't mean you get to make the decisions either. In the case of commentators, it means a lifetime of trying to justify all the bad decisions the people at the top make. Very undignified.
That's certainly a danger.
It's still a better position to occupy than pure marginalization.
Great read. Might write something in the left Muldbig genre in the future.
> Speaking of China, the reason that they went full retard on Covid (when they could have used it as a weapon to destroy the west) seems to boil down to ‘Xi Jinping is scared of the flu’.
I don't think he is scared of the flu as much as disorder. An terminal phobia of Confucian cultures, exacerbated by totalitarian forms of government. But westernized states are not immune. Japan, Taiwan and Korea seem so afraid of illegitimate children, that they would rather not have children at all.
The problem with ‘moldbuggers’ left and right is that they are largely defective physically or mentally. None are ‘EHC’ anything . Many are autistic, Jewish, or other outlier groups (Hanania; 2nd generation Palestinian Christian). Karlin is a Russian transhumanist kook. When you look at this online political tendency on a personal level and dissect its premises it offers nothing even to the base of support it tries appealing to.
None of these people have ever fought in a war or been close to a battlefield in their little coddled lives. They are academics or shut-ins. The weaklings Nietzsche (their
inspirational hero) dismissed in his day.
America is in decline not on the ascent. It is a still very wealthy and powerful at the moment but in inexorable social, moral, economic, and demographic (as far as its core white population). There won’t be a global empire of anything as there aren’t global people or citizens who would support such an entity. Americans by nature are insular and don’t particularly care what happens in other parts of the world as long as it affects them.
The U.S. economy makes a few people rich and many more poor today. It is based on financial speculation and tech is its only saving grace. The middle and working classes are more in debt than ever with a sharp decline in living standards. Their children and grandchildren will have even lower living standards. Barring a complete political and social revolution along with a restructuring of the economy beck to production and development and away from financial parasitism and speculation, poverty and decline is the likely future.
One big difference between Moldbug and the DeepLeft/Hanania types: the latter are obsessed with data/statistics.
Right, but I tend to think that's an argument in favour of Left Moldbuggism.
Hard to spend all day looking at graphs without turning into a GDP-brained utilitarian. The genuinely reactionary version of Moldbug Thought: we should have used Covid as an excuse to end all international trade, Carlyle was right about slavery, salus populi suprema lex, etc.
The term utilitarian is used to mean two different things. One is a superficially attractive but deeply flawed theory of ethics that is espoused today by a very small group of people. The other is any attempt to base your political beliefs on reasoned engagement with evidence with awareness that there are greater and lesser evils that must be weighed against each other. In the latter sense, all people with sense are 'utilitarians' and rejection of 'utilitarianism' is the path to madness. Any attempt to implement the concept of salus populi suprema lex also involves 'utilitarianism' in this sense.
Sure, my point was just that ethics is sometimes downstream from epistemology: being obsessed with data/statistics will lead you to prioritize the goods and evils that you can most easily quantify (GDP, IQ, life expectancy, fertility rate, etc.).
But clearly there’s also an a priori path to bad utilitarianism. Replacing the bureaucratic state with a JSC that controls the army via blockchain… this is Bentham-level autism.
'Sure, my point was just that ethics is sometimes downstream from epistemology: being obsessed with data/statistics will lead you to prioritize the goods and evils that you can most easily quantify (GDP, IQ, life expectancy, fertility rate, etc.).'
True, but being breezily unconcerned with statistics also has its own dangers.
I don't believe that there are real examples of this after the collapse of Communism. It's a hypothetical objection that does not reflect real social problems.
Goodhart Law always comes to collect the scalp of the data-monomaniacs.
But the group you are referring to will, with a straight face, make the case that Mississippians are better off than the Japanese because their GDP per capita is higher.
Yes, moldbugs project, for this reason. Is less like political science and more like a Foucaultian analysis of the provenance of the various power structures in the GAE.
Since Isreal has a high gdp,high fertility rate,high human rights index and high mean age of death why do political commentators(like the ones mentioned here) keep coming up with fancy theories and names instead of copying the juice
RH basically worships Israel and, though I don't share his sentiments, I have long thought this was basically correct from his standpoint.
Problem is Hanania is against applying Israel's immigration policy to the US. He thinks the US needs more immigration.
Immigration to Israel in 1990 was 200,000, equal to 4.5% of the population at the time. By contrast, immigration to America was about 1% of the population in 2023. Israel has extensive policies specifically for the purpose of boosting immigration.
Now, you will probably respond with some WN talking point about how this is different because Israel wants Jews, whereas America takes anyone. That is certainly a relevant difference, but it is not really a relevant criticism of Richard Hananiah who, while typically slippery and evasive on the issue, has admitted that immigration to Europe has not been beneficial and believes America benefits because it gets better immigrants. For him, Mexicans who want to make money are the equivalent of what diaspora Jews are for Israel. It is objectively a fact that the 'native' Israeli culture built by the Zionist pioneers was destroyed and replaced because of immigration no less (and probably rather more) than WASP American culture.
I personally don't believe that high immigration in Israel is such a good thing. It leads to a lowest denominator culture, and a lot of negative externalities. But Richard Hananiah is not being inconsistent in worshipping Israel while supporting high immigration. The relevant criticism of Richard Hananiah is that he always ducks the question of how in the long term America is supposed to avoid getting the same trash immigrants Europe does.
You should write a post on how immigration destroyed the original Zionist/Ashkenazi consensus. I'd be very interested.
Israel at independence was like 80% Ashkenazi. The founders explicitly pursued a policy of mass third world migration. A bunch of Mizrahim immigrated and became the ethnic majority. They had lower IQ than the Ashkenazim and were less liberal. This changed the culture a ton in all sorts of ways.
"For him, Mexicans who want to make money are the equivalent of what diaspora Jews are for Israel."
I have no idea, are diaspora Jews who immigrating to Israel as uneducated and poor as the Mexicans immigrating to the US? Do they bring Jewish drug cartels with them? Hanania's argument is just a copy of Caplan's argument. More immigration = more labor and demand = more GDP = more good, regardless of how poor and unfit for our culture they are.
"But Richard Hananiah is not being inconsistent in worshipping Israel while supporting high immigration."
Yes he is. Even when Israel has high immigration, there is some basic screening and pretty strict limitations. Hanania advocates no such thing from what I recollect about his position.
Lots and lots of non-Jewish Russians with a distant family connection migrate to Israel. The "others" in Israel are a rather middling socioeconomic status group. Lots of poor Russians in development towns and so on. They do worse than the average Jewish Israeli on tests. Probably their IQ is at most 100 while Israeli Jews average above 100.
Israeli immigration policy is that anyone who has a Jewish grandparent, their spouse, and their children can immigrate. You are Jewish if you converted or if you have a Jewish mother. A bunch of Orthodox converts migrated from Colombia. Let's not forget the time Israel flew in a bunch of Ethiopian Jews on overcrowded planes. Ethiopian Jews are racially the same as other North Ethiopians, with no detectable special Jewish ancestry. Yemenite Jews, like Yigal Amir who shot Rabin, look like normal Arabians, with no detectable Levantine ancestry.
What would the analogue for the US be? Anyone who is at least a quarter European by ancestry, their spouses, and their children? Let's also force them to practice Christianity. Oh, well then that would include Mexican Mestizos. Almost half European by ancestry and practice Christianity.
Israel is very very far from the ethnostate that some WNs imagines it is. This is not even discussing how Israel is 20% Arabs, how the Arab society has normal Arabs, Bedouins, Christians, Druze, how the Jewish majority has Ashkenazi, European Sephardic, Iraqis, mixed, other Mizrahim...
Ethiopians are what, 2% of the Israeli population? And what about the Columbians? Even less? And don't bring up the Arab population as if they just immigrated a few decades ago. They were there in 1948, and long before.
This is all obfuscation from the fact that Israel is very specific about who it lets in its country. The US and Europe are not today. You can be Indian, Chinese, African, etc, have any or no religion, and as long as you fill out the right form or sneak across the border you can stay.
Israel at independence was like 80% Ashkenazi. The founders explicitly pursued a policy of mass third world migration. A bunch of Mizrahim immigrated and became the ethnic majority. They had lower IQ than the Ashkenazim and were less liberal. This changed the culture a ton in all sorts of ways.
America is not located right by Africa. So it won't be flooded with African asylum seekers. Perhaps Haitians, but Haiti is quite small. Most illegal immigrants are from Latin America. Having lots of Hispanics in your country is fine, it doesn't pose a problem like unselected mass migration from the Muslim world or from Africa. Yes the Hispanic IQ is a fair bit lower and the murder rate is maybe 2x, but they assimilate just fine. This is small peanuts compared to the potential gains from embryo selection, and certainly better to have Hispanic immigration than to have an aging population. If we had Israel-levels of TFR things would be different.
It's not obvious what the secret ingredient is.
Good article and I agree with your overall point that thinking the GAE's fall is imminent and monarchy is soon or a viable solution is beyond cringe at this point.
As someone on the right my main objections are to your points 6 (Living in America is not that bad RE money and crime), 7 (anti-Whiteness is tolerable), 8 (religion and traditional living will be replaced with transhumanism) and the problem of birthrates
So if not collapse and takeover what now? Build a multitude of right-wing organizations not to takeover the entire GAE but to serve the interests of our people. This is not the benedict optoin or the clear pill of total escape from the current system.
We need to move beyond the juvenile attractiveness of our ideas and instead prove our worthiness by building real world fraternities, castles, communities, churches, etc.
Every time I revisit the question of alternatives, the last chapter of Fukuyama's "End of History" pops back into my head. Watching and endless stream of clips of HTS jihadis firing AKs while doing burnouts in Assad's tanks on Telegram these last few days really drives the point home.
The human spirit is truly indomitable. All attempts to contain it, to domesticate it in a managerial technocratic global empire will result in fertility collapse, from which Hayat Tahrir as-Sham will be there to liberate you.
I dunno. I think HTS mouthing US corporate speak and disavowing its Al Queda roots in order to win kind of points to global managerial liberalism being more indomitable than the human spirit.
I expect that in this case it is all lip service.
I prefer Left Landian or Left Alamariuian. I may have read a PDF of Fanged Noumena 10 years ago, but I can't remember. The two people who most inspired me as a teenager were Kevin Philips, former Republican strategist turned Democrat, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cold Warrior and supporter of the Taliban. Moldbug has been good at marketing, interviews, storytelling and is more famous and successful than Nick Land, but I don't know that his ideas were more foundational or influential on me than Land.
Before all of that, my first political fetish was libertarianism, which is where Moldbug comes from as well. I feel bad about saying non-free market things, because it upsets people who are closest to my personality type, and it gets lonely. A pure free market is sometimes the optimal solution to a problem, but since that is usually impossible, aggressive state intervention can be positive. This isn't a dogmatic belief, but for example, I am in favor of a federal property tax to depopulate coastal urban centers and trillions spent in new housing between Knoxville, Albany, OKC, and Fargo. I suppose it depends on your definition whether or not this counts as "leftist economics."
I kind of elided you and RH on this point. His argument is relatively simple: big business leverages dumb people to get enough pro market policies passed even though they are unpopular, and we can just keep doing this indefinitely. You have a more sophisticated version which is that economically inefficient policies can have positive political purposes. Your unions article was a good example.
Of course, while there is a good bit of overlap, the interests of big business are not identical with free-market policies.
Right, but there's enough overlap to keep economic growth going.
One interesting thing to note is that Hanania style Left-Moldbuggism seems to be leaking slowly in mainstream politics.
How so? Got any examples?
Ok, what I actually meant to say was "Hanania is braking into mainstream politics". Oops, got too carried way.
The interesting thing about him is that he doesn't really try to hide his core beliefs at all, yet he seems to be growing larger and larger. Some mainstream political pundits openly associate with him, Matthew Yglesias is the obvious example here, and it might be the case that a lot of liberals might be secretly reading him.
Also, the newly elected VP openly admits that Moldbug has influenced him, so it's clear that this ideas are becoming more prominent among the political elite. I know this still isn't "mainstream", but it's a pattern.
can you point to any evidence of this? esp. of increasing engagement from Yglesias in the last year?
You haven't seen their twitter? It's pretty obvious Yglesias intellectualy respects him and reads his opinions
can you link some evidence of this from the last year?
I was about to take the L for this one but yeah (https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1820148557137006800,https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1772043771448008764) there is a moderate engagement between them, even though Hanania reposts him much more. Guess you could argue it's kind of one sided. Yglesias does 100% read him though (https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1688377862011617280).
When I said Hanania was growing larger and larger I meant that his works seem to be becoming more and more mainstream (people in the next Republican cabinet have read his book about how Woke originates from Civil right law and have taken his recommendations seriously) not that this growth was happening among pundits. My bad. And despite all this, some people like Yglesias are still mutuals with him.